New Betas Wanted

There we go. I just did it. I sent the request to my principal for approval to obtain a new panel of beta readers. I'm, what I estimate to be, four or five hours of work away from a completed rough draft of WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL.

The novel itself has been more difficult to write than LitD. It's taken its toll emotionally. Whereas LitD was a constant high, a wave of pleasure and pride and fantasy, I've had more doubt about WINTER's contents...and more nightmares.  It's the book that I wonder at being able to write at all, and that at some points I feel trapped within. It's high school and college wrapped together--the containment within institutional walls with the delicate promise of liberation in the end.

I look forward to revisions.

Neglected but not forgotten

I have this large--and perhaps unfounded--fear that if I don't update my blog regularly, something evil will happen to my writing career. I read several writing blogs, and many say, "make sure writers have an online presence," and, "agents want to see that you're out there," and, "agents don't like to see a forgotten blog."

It's not forgotten.

I've been busy writing. I'm up to 50K consecutive words in WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL.

So while I have been neglecting my blog, I haven't been neglecting my novel.

That's more important, right? :)

Science fiction to contemporary, first novel to second

Much of my writing time has been spent on my new work in progress--WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL. This novel is in part inspired by a suggestion from some of the people I met at the Colgate Writers' Conference last June. (Unfortunately, I will not be attending this year, although I wish I were.) I don't speak openly about my childhood, but I also don't hide it. So when I spent a week with the same people, they had a way of drawing out my past. Upon multiple occasions, they told me my past should be my next novel--that's the story they wanted told. After spending hours on LitD and deeming it complete--at least until an agent loves it--I delved into WoBH.

I'm finding that writing contemporary is much more difficult than writing science fiction. For LitD, it wasn't a real world, so I didn't have to double- and triple-check facts before I committed them to paper. Yes, some of the science I wrote about there is real; but much of it isn't, and that's okay because it's fiction. Now, I find myself constantly checking facts. When, exactly, does this high school music group hold auditions? Is the color of the sign at such-and-such a place really yellow? I'm sure many people wouldn't blame some small inaccuracies, but if I change a school's mascot, per se, there might be issues. But I'm finding it very time consuming.

Also, because it's my second novel, I'm also being much more careful in this first draft. Some sentence structure techniques/rules I learned when writing LitD are now ingrained in me, but others are not. I find that I spend more time making sure that the words I use are the ones I want, even though I know this will ultimately be edited and changed a million times over from the version I write now.

Lastly, because I'm basing this novel in part on how I grew up, it's a mix of fictional scenes and real scenes that have since been fictionalized. Finding a balance here is difficult. Very difficult, indeed.

Why I didn't sleep well last night

I'm completely wishing this winter over. Winters are so...difficult. They're...cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. Like a shoulder, turned away from me, instead of moving to embrace me.

I had this dream last night. It comes occasionally, but never too lucidly. In the dream, my mother has many children. My brother is still the eldest and I'm right after him, but then there are little kids. Sometimes three or four. Sometimes my sisters are there, too. Sometimes they aren't.

Last night, I was younger--not old enough to leave the house yet, but my brother was his age now. My mother's husband, who was not my father, was in a rage. I remember egging him on. I kept coming back at him and jibing him, making him angrier and angrier. I wanted to push him. 

Eventually, things escalated. Usually when it does in my dreams, I'm in cellar with its fieldstone walls and dirt floor, looking through a window into a sky of nothingness. Last night, when it escalated, all the children and I were in one of the upstairs bedrooms--the one I shared with all my siblings but one in real life. I had a cordless phone and a cell phone, so this was present times, because we only had a corded phone growing up and my parents would have killed us if we tried to use the one gigantic cordless phone. I tried multiple times to call the police, but it would only ring three times and then hang up. My mother's husband had somehow rigged our phones to not be able to call out. My cell phone couldn't even call 9-1-1. I tried calling my best friend from HS's parents house. Very often, she and her parents play a role in my dreams. In real life, she lives in Florida having moved there after college. In the dream, she was in Florida, but I knew her parents still lived up the street. I dialed the number a million times, but it wouldn't go through.

The kids and I resigned ourselves to whatever was coming--something involving gasoline. My mom was downstairs crying and screaming. Her husband was yelling. I took the plastic bag of clothing a neighbor gave us for our youngest sister (one year old)--not my real youngest sister--and started folding the clothes to keep my mind busy. They were in pristine condition. It was like the neighbor's daughter had never worn them. One of my sisters was younger. Maybe 13. She said, "He's our dad now. He's always provided for us." I pushed her down against the bed and pinned her there with my arm. "He has never provided for us," I screamed at her. "These clothes--they're hand-me-downs. Nothing we own is ours. Don't you ever say he provides for us." The one-year-old--she had dark hair and a round face--began to cry, as did the other children.

I grabbed my cell phone and dialed one more number. It had a 617 area code. I don't know who I was calling, but it wasn't my brother, but my brother picked up the phone. I whispered into it and asked him to please call the police. I almost thought he wasn't going to, but then I remembered what we shared when we were younger (because for a moment I was my real age again and things were real) and knew he would. I hung up without waiting for him to answer.

Moments later, he was in the room with me. He smiled at me and said he did it. He called the police this time. I felt closer to him in the dream than I do in real life--like I was 10 and he was 11 again, and we would be best friends forever. 

I looked out the window that was mine as a child, before the cold downstairs bedroom was given to me. Seven police cruisers pulled up in front of the house. Some of them crept into the U driveway, some of them stayed on the street. None of them had lights on. A feeling of peace came over me. And I woke.

It was 2:30am. I didn't fall back asleep last night. 

Except for the fact that the lights weren't on in the cruisers, and there aren't as many kids in my family, and my mother has only recently remarried (to the loveliest man on the planet), and my bedroom really was downstairs--IT was very much like how I remember it happening, and IT was much of what I forgot. The feelings, I mean. 

And the cops. There were a lot of cops. In real life.

This is why the winter needs to end. Because sometimes real life feels like a dream. And sometimes a dream is only an echo of real life. And sometimes the winter isn't just the winter, and sometimes the winter is more than just cold. Sometimes it's cold.

First Five Pages Workshop

Read the first five pages of my WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL for January's First Five Pages Workshop. This month's mentor is Geoffrey Girard (Project Cain). Over the course of this month, I get to refine my opening with the help of him and other writers.

On another very cryptic note, I hope to have some good news to share soon.

On Seeds of Ideas and Outlines

This weekend, I was asked, "When you started writing LitD, did you do any prewriting or note taking or any system for organizing your ideas first? Or did you just jump write in and start writing? I only ask because...I started getting little seeds for a novel...trying to figure out a way to develop turning those seeds into a basic plot line is sort of tough right now. So I just wondered how you started out initially in the planning/writing process."

This is actually something I talked to the hubby about recently. Those of you who follow me on twitter and Facebook know I've been working on another novel, which I have tentatively titled WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL. It's a **very** fictionalized version of my life growing up on the farm. I was telling  my hubby that I'm having a harder time plotting it than I did LitD. His response was, "Well, LitD was inspired, right? This one is more...work." And it's true. LitD was the story I had to tell because it wouldn't leave me alone until I told it. I did minimal plotting. My characters introduced themselves to me and--it sounds cliche--they made everything in my novel happen.

That's not to say there wasn't any pre-writing. It took me a wicked long time to learn my MC Celia. Unlike the other characters, she had to spend much more time explaining herself. It look me somewhere between 3,000 to 5,000 words (which eventually all got cut) so I could get to get to know her. You know, this. I already wrote about it here.

The funny thing is I hadn't a plot in mind when I started writing LitD. I had a setting. I knew I wanted Celia in the Woods, but that was it. To me, the Woods would be where Celia came of age. So at first there was this big empty gap from the first fifteen pages until she got to the Woods. It wasn't until she spent some time in the Woods that I finally figured out a way for her to get there.

I tend to be organized. I like lists. Except, none of those propensities came out when I wrote LitD. I never once thought I'd be a "pantser" when it came to writing a book. Even by the time I got to the final chapters of LitD, I hadn't known exactly how it would end. When I wrote the last page, I was in disbelief. Could LitD possibly be over?

Now that I'm working on WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL, I'm finding that each time I attempt to plot, it gets lost, and the writing doesn't come as naturally. I've got about 20,000 words written, but right now their basic sketches of the characters instead of plot. My working outline has changed a lot since I originally started it. It's still very much taking shape.

WINTER was similar to what the person who asked me this question posed. It started with two sentences; I started to explore them. That's how I discovered Sarah (although, I might change her name). I took the two lines--"She rolled over to check if the milk was frozen. It was."--and played with the scene the two lines offered me. After I had about 3 pages typed, I changed it to first person and saw what happened. I liked it better. I had to alter some things, but it felt more genuine. Then I wrote some more, and as I kept writing, I kept slipping into first person present. So I went back and changed it to that. 

Each time I did this, I'd get this little nubbin of an idea of who Sarah is and what her world entails. I keep getting a better sense of plot. My current manuscript has all those pieces scattered between paragraphs and chapters and added to the end. Sometimes they're just lines that I've since elaborated upon, and sometimes they're tiny bits of plot. 

I wrote this way with LitD, but with LitD it felt more organized, less fragmented. I'm definitely not organized with WINTER, and it's certainly fragmented. I only have a couple scenes that have transitions into other scenes. I'm still learning about Sarah's life. I've got a good idea what I want to have happen to her, but I haven't made it "fit" yet.

I guess the whole thing I've learned so far is that I'm a pantser. I can't seem to stick to an outline; I prefer to let my characters decide what's going to happen. When I do that, the writing feels more natural. And hey, if it feels that way, it's gotta come across that way in my writing, right?

Blogging at YA Highway Today

I'm blogging at YA Highway today about writing, depression, and gaining control.

Here's a preview:

The first time I sat in my soon-to-be counselor's office, she asked me, "Why are you here?"

Why was I there? Was it because I couldn't stop crying? Was it because I couldn't rise from bed? Or, when I managed to go to class I fled halfway through, professor and classmates staring, to have my panic attack in the girls' room? Yeah, I guess it was all those things. But what I said was, "I'm losing control."


To read the post in its entirety, go here:
http://www.yahighway.com/2013/11/guest-post-by-april-c-rose-on-writing.html